“Unsustainable.” That’s the Navy’s own official assessment of the spending rates required to keep the fleet large and modern enough to do its missions. For the service to state this in writing ratchets up not just the rhetoric but the likelihood of future budget battles in the Pentagon and on the Hill — especially over the immensely expensive program to replace aging Ohio-class nuclear missile submarines (SSBNs), which the Navy desperately wants someone else to pay for.
Every year, the Navy publishes a 30-year shipbuilding plan. Every year, both partisan and neutral observers deride it as fiscally unrealistic: “The way you fund the shipbuilding plan is fantasyland,” House seapower subcommittee chairman Randy Forbes once told me. But this year, for the first time, the Navy plan itself admits it can’t be done.
Senior admirals and officials have been increasingly candid in recent months about the mismatch between the ships they want to build and the money they’ll have to build them. But they’ve never before been quite this blunt, not in an official report to Congress.
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